Nassim Taleb: Risk is Increasing, Not Improving
By Barry Ritholtz - June 15th, 2010, 1:30PM
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Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
June 15th, 2010 at 8:34 pm
How can we be a few bond auctions away from a fail with the 10-year under three percent and a half, while corporate profits are exploding?
The six-seven trillion estimates are if we straight-line the Bush structural deficit. Clinton got us back to zero deficit in eight years. We can do it again.
The marginal few million of unemployed do not have the skills for the goods and services desired now and in the near future (either un-educated or from the former easy-as-it-goes real estate industry.) Their “tax base” is marginal in a time of increasing profits, exports, innovation etc. Deficit estimates are already coming down.
The inflation-indexed bonds to react to hyper-inflation and the perceptions of hyper-inflation, they go up in price.
If the Tea Partiers are going to tell me where they will be willing to cut the gov’t largess from which they derive benefit, I will listen to them, but if Social Security, Medicare, the military, Veteren’s benefits and payments on the debt are off the table, than they don’t have a solution. Getting rid of the Dept. of Education is spit in the ocean.
June 16th, 2010 at 1:41 am
@VennData,
“How can we be a few bond auctions away from a fail with the 10-year under three percent and a half, while corporate profits are exploding?”
Exploding? Have you looked at the ECRI lately? Imploding is the word you are looking for.
“Clinton got us back to zero deficit in eight years. We can do it again.”
Clinton had a Republican congress that encouraged some degree of austerity (and prevented Hillary’s socialized medicine). You really think the word “austerity” is in Obama’s vocabulary?
“Deficit estimates are already coming down.”
OK, you are just on drugs now.
June 16th, 2010 at 7:50 am
Okay, I have read both “Fooled By Randomness” and “The Black Swan”. Here though, Taleb confuses me: “Gold has disappointed”? How? By going from $250/oz to $1,200/oz? And he says: “If you can buy instruments that protect you from inflation . . .” – okay, if not gold then what? Oil? Real estate? Equities? Yes, yes, I know why he doesn’t want to say what he is doing, but who can guess? Please tell me.
As to his assertion about those who have failed to predict this mess, I say that is because they are blinded by their own technical sophistry. All of those PHDs running highly “sophisticated” econometric modeling software on all of those Cray computers has predicted . . . ? Well it has predicted everything EXCEPT what will happen next.
He is correct though, about government budget projections. Who cares what they are? They are always wrong in the long run, and usually the short run as well. Keynes was right about the long run.
June 20th, 2010 at 6:38 am
People would not disagree with what they are expecting from other participants to the market. So it is a matter to anticipate what they will think. Obviously there are rules. In every case, as the great apes do, they will consider the egoism going on.